Marxist father of Afrikanism dies
Prof. Dani Wadada Nabudere, 79, lawyer, academic, researcher, pan African, activist, community worker, husband and father of five, died of cardiac arrest at his home in his home town of Mbale, eastern Uganda, on Nov. 9.
The manner and circumstances of his death, in his local town where he spent a great deal of his time working with what he called “my people” says a lot about a man whose rare intellect was acknowledged by many around the globe.
One of Africa’s leading thinkers and author of African socialism or Socialist Africa?, Abulrahman Mohamed Babu, wrote the following about Nabudere in the ‘introduction’ to the 1982 Tanzania Publishing House book edited by Yash Tandon, University of Dar es Salaam Debate on Class, State and Imperialism:
“Marxists do not engage in debates just for the fun of it as in school debates. Their principal task is to change the world. Their debates are about the correct understanding of the world around us. Once this world is understood then the task is to outline policies, which will guide their struggle.”
He then added that the essays in the book originate in response to the publication of three most important books to come out of East Africa. One of them was Dani Wadada Nabudere’s The Political Economy of Imperialism. The others were Issa Shivji’s Class Struggles in Tanzania and Politics and Class Formation in Uganda by Mahmood Mamdani.
“These books have inspired a lot of thinking among East African intellectuals,” Babu concluded.
When he visited the Walter Sisulu University in South Africa as part of a busy lecture circuit in March 2010, Nabudere’s talk was proclaimed as a “foreground to Africanity and the historical African experience”.
His historical writings and speeches were said to tackle “matters of social reality as they have manifested themselves historically through inequalities in the distribution of wealth and development between dominant and subordinate societies as seen in the gap between rich and poor.”
Nabudere’s sense of duty to poor Africans lives on in the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute that he founded in his hometown and to which he devoted the last six years of his life. Hopefully, his hope to nurture it into a full-fledged university will be realised one day.
Named after the late prominent Jamaican intellectual Pan-Africanist Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Nabudere’s institute was to bridge the vast gap between the cosmopolitan, western-oriented African elites, and the majority of Africans regarding higher education, research and learning.
Nabudere, who preferred to work with the people at the “grassroots”, was concerned that many Africans remain illiterate and marginalized.
He routinely argued that “grassroots programmes make ‘democracy’ real and annul the thinking that democracy is only about elections but about the people and their capacity to utilise resources to change their own situation”. On many occasions, he talked about an “alternative society” marked by the “triumph of popular concerns”.
Nabudere and other prominent African thinkers like Ake Claude, Samir Amin, and Tandon developed a radical and pessimistic view of capitalistic development of Africa in which globalisation was perceived as the “conquest of capital over the rest of the world”.
These arguments were at the heart of The Dar es Salaam Marxist Debates on the 1970s “cold war” era when Tanzania was the Mecca of socialist scholarship and focused on knowledge production in Africa.
They argue that the capitalist system propagated by the western powers, now driven by international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, can only sink Africans deeper into poverty.
This view came out prominently in Nabudere’s writings. One of his books is The Crash of International Finance-Capital and its Implications for the Third World, first published in 1989 as a Marxist analysis of the 1987 financial crisis.
In a review of the book published by the online Pambazuka News, although he later brands Nabudere’s work as lacking in “stronger analytical engagement”, Martin Williams hails Nabudere’s foresight for “foreshadowing some causes of the current crisis, having identified some of the problems arising from debt securitisation, speculation and the rise of the financial economy at the expense of the real economy in the West.”
Percyslage Chigora of the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe, in a review of a book co-edited by Nabudere and Mandaza Ibbo, wrote, “Pan-Africanism and Integration in Africa is a pacesetting book that endeavours to analyse the African situation in the face of the powerful forces of globalisation. The contributors in the book generally push for the inclusion of a Pan-African flavour in any attempt to defeat the destructive forces of globalisation.”
Many other books by Nabudere, like Political Economy of Imperialism; Afrikology, philosophy and wholeness: An epistemology; Archie Mafeje. Scholar, Activist and Thinker, underline his inclination towards Afro-centred development and struggle against imperialism.
It may be impossible to remain a Marxist in the original sense of the word, and many of Nabudere’s colleagues with whom they shared Marxist sentiments jumped ship and embraced capitalism. But Nabudere probably lived like a Marxist throughout, despite the ideology ostensibly getting out of fashion in the wake of surging neo-liberalism.
Nabudere is widely reputed for being a member of the Gang of Four – four Ugandans who played a key role after the fall of former dictator Idi Amin in 1979.
In an interview with The Independent in November 2008, Nabudere said “the description the ‘Gang of Four’ was at the time of the UNLF (1979) coined by either Mahmood Mamdani or Yoweri Museveni to describe four individuals who played a leading role in the formation of the Uganda National Liberation Front in Moshi.”
The other members of the ‘gang’ were Prof. Edward Rugumayo and Prof. Yash Tandon, who are still alive, and Prof. Omwony Ojwok, who died on November 11, 2007. Rugumayo and Ojwok joined Museveni’s government while Tandon, who lives in London, has been active in advocating for fairness in international trade.
Nabudere, who was Minister of Justice in 1979 and Minister of Culture, Community Development and Rehabilitation between 1979 and 1980 in the UNLF Interim Government, returned to politics for a short while after returning from exile in 1992, representing Budadiri West in the Constituent Assembly in 1994-5.
Even when some of his colleagues joined Museveni’s government, Nabudere continued to be a harsh critic of the NRM government. In a paper he gave at The Uganda Federal Agenda -The untold story of self-determination, in a veiled attack on Museveni, said: “This leader, who had been called the ‘beacon of light’ by US imperialism, is set to become another Mobutu in the region.”
Prof. Nabudere was born on December 15, 1932 in Bamuyamba Village in Budadiri. He was buried at his ancestral home in Sironko district.
The last interview
Uganda is in free fall – Nabudere
Then-Independent’s Onghwens Kisangala interviewed Nabudere in November 2008. The excerpts below show how foresighted he was:
The country appears to be in free-fall politically, economically, and socially. What is your interpretation of recent events?
If by recent events you mean the Temangalo affair, I think it is clear the NRM government has lost direction. From the supposedly ‘revolutionary fundamental change’ achievement, they have demonstrated what they actually stood for: the fleecing of the country. Corruption under the NRM has been growing and there is no indication that the government has the capacity to deal with this problem. The President is not helping matters by interfering in Parliamentary investigations before Parliament passes on their findings to him for action as head of the Executive. What he has been doing by summoning the NRM Caucus and the so-called Political High Command is to shelter some people from public oversight. In short, he himself is protecting the corrupt instead of exposing them. This is in sharp contrast with what is going on in Rwanda as far as cases of corruption are concerned. You are therefore right in concluding that the country is in a ‘free-fall.’
Previously, President Museveni would have reacted to such blatant corruption with a reshuffle. It is more than two years since the cabinet was changed. What is your view?
I don’t think that reshuffles are the answer to corruption. The answer to corruption is to give room to the legal processes and until the constitution of the country can be allowed to function as it was intended to be, the Judiciary and the police as well as the Director of Public Prosecutions will never have the autonomy to carry out their responsibilities. And yet as we have seen in the case of the Temangalo affair, it is the President who is interfering with the parliamentary investigations and hence the judicial process. Therefore, the problem lies at the very top of executive authority.
What is your view about the state of the country today?
NRM came to power with the claim that it was strong on ‘security’. Indeed, there has been an improvement in the behaviour of the security forces. At the same time, however, we have witnessed certain high-handedness in dealing with the opposition especially. The police has been militarised and we have seen arbitrary arrests of MPs and other political opponents. We have also witnessed the invasion of the High Court by the ‘Black Mambas’ to frustrate the legal process in the case where a high ranking opposition member was being charged with offences that have never been followed up, showing again that arrests and shoddy trials are being used as a form of punishment of opponents. The country is getting alarmed when particular groups such as the Balaalo are being given preferential treatment when they invade other people’s lands.
A political censure [of Amama Mbabazi and Ezra Suruma] is looming in parliament. Basing on the previous censures, what do you see happening?
I cannot predict what will happen. All I can say is that even on previous occasions, there have been presidential interferences.
How has party politics helped Uganda?
Multiparty politics cannot function well when the government does not respect their role but instead uses the coercive state bodies such as the armed forces and the police to harass them. The system cannot also function when the electorate is reduced to poverty. What is needed is a new way of mobilising the people to go beyond existing politics in Kampala, the way Barack Obama has turned the US upside down. The question is whether we have such a politician.
The last two presidential elections were settled by the Supreme Court. What electoral reforms will give Uganda free and fair poll? I think that the recommendations were clear from the judgements themselves. You cannot have an Electoral Commission that is chosen by one party to the election to be independent. You cannot also have a free and fair election when the incumbent president uses the armed forces as a personal institution and the police as a praetorian execution force.
As a member of the “Gang of Four”, do you think you made the right decision not to join President Museveni’s government even as your colleagues joined him?
There appears to be some fascination in certain political elite circles in Uganda about the phenomenon of the ‘Gang of Four’. The fact of the matter is that the ‘Gang of Four’ does not exist. It only exists in the imagination of those individuals who, for their own purposes, try to resurrect the image of the ‘Gang of Four’ to meet their psychic needs! The description the ‘Gang of Four’ was at the time of the UNLF coined by either Mahmood Mamdani or Yoweri Museveni to describe four individuals who played a leading role in the formation of the Uganda National Liberation Front in Moshi. Thereafter these individuals came to be connected with the institutions that were created in the interim government under Yusuf Lule and Godfrey Binaisa. These individuals are Dani Nabudere, the late Omwony Ojwok, Edward Rugumayo and Yash Tandon. They discharged their responsibility quite well and it is only in that period in which they played a leading role that Ugandans ever enjoyed a period of popular democracy with the Mayumba Kumi cells giving ‘dual power’ to the grassroots communities in every corner of the country to run affairs in their localities when government broke down in the country with the fleeing of dictator Idd Amin Dada. After the Military Commission took over power in 1980, ushering in a new period of dictatorship, which continues up to now, the four individuals formed the Uganda National Liberation Front (Anti-Dictatorship) to continue the legacy of the UNLF, but this organisation was dissolved in July 1992 and its dissolution was announced to the whole country for their information.
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